Before making any big moves with planning, promotion, or guest speakers, getting down to basics should be your first move! If you find the question “what is a webinar”, running around your head, don’t worry. In simplest terms, it’s an online presentation that visually stimulates, engages, and educates.
Organizing a webinar is a piece of cake in 2021. With an abundance of webinar software available on the market, the barrier of entry is relatively low for virtually any company planning to use video content in their marketing activities.
However, not all webinars end up having an impact on your business bottom line. In order to organize an effective webinar that fuels your sales pipeline, you need to have a solid strategy in mind. It includes promoting a webinar to collect signups as well as converting them into sales. How can you organize a killer webinar that will help you achieve your marketing and sales goals?
In this article, we will share ten tips that can become a part of your standard operating procedure when launching your next webinar. Let’s dive in!
1. Involve industry influencers
Before exploring how you can increase the number of signups for your webinar, let’s first see what blocks your ideal leads from signing up.
Firstly, your audience can perceive brand webinars as purely promotional content. Who wouldn’t hate the screen time with a company pitching its services before finally offering some value? Next, if your brand is still fresh and hasn’t got influence just yet, you can fail to build sufficient trust and convince users to leave their email address on a signup page.
So what can you do to break these objections? By finding brand influencers and involving industry experts, you can make your webinar look more unbiased and, at the same time, make your content topics a bit more interesting. If your guest is a recognizable figure in the niche, you can gain more trust in your target market and make it easier for people to sign up.
For example, Asana has invited two experts representing other tech businesses to talk about the topic of remote communication together. Slack, Dropbox, and Asana have overlapping audiences and their products are not competing against each other which makes this collaboration score a bull’s eye.
The topic of the webinar – remote work – attracts the right audience that will end up using the guests’ products as a part of their remote team tool stack.
Source: Asana
By inviting influencers, you build more trust with your audience. Also, your keynotes can help spread the word about your webinar among their followers and connections. If you are going to invite more than one speaker who represents a different company, make sure your audiences overlap and your products or services are not competing. This way, you will all benefit from this collaboration.
2. Choose the right topic
Your choice for the webinar topic can either attract the right audience or the attendees that would probably fail to convert into paying customers. How can you design your topic wisely?
First, get back to your ideal customer profile and recall the challenges and pains your customer usually faces. Your webinar topic should deal with one of the pains or challenges and will help your attendees to solve it right after the webinar. Sounds kind of abstract, right? Let’s illustrate it with some examples.
Take a look at this webinar sign up page. The goal of this webinar is to help beginning startup founders validate their business idea before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into development.
The pain startup founders face is a lack of certainty if their business idea makes sense. They can also fear that the time needed to validate their idea in a traditional way is usually quite costly. The webinar offers a solution to these challenges – a workshop on idea validation.
Source: Kissmetrics
Make sure that you focus on actual challenges and present solutions with your webinar material. This way, the webinar topic will attract an audience that has a certain problem and can use your services or products after the webinar.
Pro Tip: Digital Marketing Consultant from Sell Click states that you'll get a higher webinar registration by crafting a headline with a curiosity gap for your opt-in page. This will make your target audience want to check out what you have to say in your webinar. Here are some of the examples: “7 New Hacks for Saving Time and Money on Product Launches” or “What Blocks You from Achieving a x2 Higher ROI”.
3. Prepare a plan
When getting ready for the webinar, make sure you have at least 3-4 weeks to promote your online event and reserve a few days to think over an overall plan. Come up with a webinar structure, additional topics that you can later discuss with your webinar co-hosts on a call.
Make sure you are aligned about the structure of the webinar and are ready with the topics breakdown. At this stage, you should be clear about your sign up landing page copy and other communication which you will deploy during the promotion stage.
Get your plan ready before you start promoting the webinar. Of course, you can add a couple more updates to the topics or page elements at the promotion stage, but those should rather be small changes. Avoid making dramatic changes at the promotion stage unless they are justified for campaign optimization.
4. Choose a user-friendly webinar software
Technical issues can arise during the webinar. Also, your attendees can get lost in numerous features of a webinar room and then beg for help on an online chat.
While annoying, these issues can influence your customer’s experience and an overall impression about your company.
If you are aiming at creating a positive impression and offering a great experience for your guests, choose your free webinar software wisely. Pay attention to a user-interface and the organization of different functions. Finally, test it out before buying! Answer these questions that will help you make a final decision.
Do you feel comfortable using the software?
Can you easily find all necessary features on the dashboard?
How well do you rate the aesthetics of the dashboard?
Can you integrate it with your marketing automation software in a few clicks?
Can you customize webinar confirmation and reminders?
Can attendees save a webinar reminder in their Google calendar after the registration?
If you want to get an unbiased opinion about the best webinar software platforms, ask around on tech groups. Then choose the most optimal option that fits your business – both in terms of user experience, price, and necessary features.
Source: Facebook
5. Focus on promotion
You can apply the Pareto principle to the webinar organization and promotion – 20% of value is in webinar organization, the other 80% is in webinar promotion.
Choosing the right topic and guests is not enough to make your webinar a real success. You need to work out a plan for the webinar promotion that will help you generate more sign ups and later nurture the webinar leads into paying customers. Your plan can include writing emails for email campaigns, organic group promotion, Youtube marketing, or paid ads. Here are a few tips you can consider including into your webinar promotion strategy.
- Ask your guests to promote
While you have to do the most work around the promotion part, you can always benefit from your keynotes’ audiences. Asking your guest speakers to announce the upcoming webinar is one of the best social media rules that you can follow. Also, you can send a newsletter to their subscribers, or conduct a live transmission on their private group on Facebook. If you have previously built good relationships with your guests, they will most likely help with the promotion in some way.
- Use niche Facebook groups
One would argue if Facebook is a good platform to distribute the content targeted at the B2B segment. Having some doubts? Then check out how other companies are already generating leads with their lead magnets (including webinars) on Facebook groups.
For example, Dan Martell is using one of the Facebook SaaS groups to distribute his 80+ email templates and generate leads.
Source: Facebook
While many groups prohibit members from sharing any kind of promotional links leading to external websites, Dan has got round this restriction. He asked to write a comment to get a link in a direct message.
Source: Facebook
The post generated 1.4k comments (people asking for a lead magnet) and has most definitely resulted in a bunch of qualified leads for Dan.
- Deploy LinkedIn automation
If you have built a considerable network on your Linkedin, you can utilize smart automation to invite guests to your webinar. This strategy takes time as you have to nurture the relations on this professional network before asking for favours.
Instead of writing long messages and sending a link, ask if your selected Linkedin connection would be interested in the webinar topic. Open questions would encourage a response and also don’t look overpromotional.
Use tools such as OctopusCRM to automate your LinkedIn outreach. Send messages in smaller batches to just a few percent of your audience to be safe.
- Use outreach to gather signups
Outreach sucks when it is used as a spray and pray tactic. However, if you decide to target the leads that will benefit from your webinar, you can get a much higher response rate and more signups.
6. Set up pre-webinar reminders
A number of webinar signups is not the only metric you should account for when measuring the success of your webinars. Turn up rate is another important metric.
If you are planning to use webinar as a part of your client acquisition strategy, you should get your leads to come to the webinar, check out your content, and see the value in it. Moreover, your webinar should be engaging enough to keep users waiting by the end when you finally sell some product or service.
To increase the chances for users to remember about the webinar, you should encourage them to save the webinar date in their calendars and set up recurring emails. How many of those should you send? That’s up to you. However, consider sending at least 2 reminders – on the day of the webinar and 15 minutes before the webinar starts.
Source: Demio
7. Build demand before the webinar
Apart from reminding your leads about the upcoming webinars, you should also consider sending some nurturing emails days before the webinar. Let’s say you decide to keep the key reminders for the last days before the webinar. However, if your leads sign up a few weeks before, you can build interest in the topic by sharing some interesting case studies or stories in the newsletter emails.
So how can you write better emails? Read more to write better! Sign up for the webinars of other companies and observe their writing style, note what you like the most about them. Then, integrate it in your writing.
8. Measure conversion rate
If you don’t collect enough signups or your attendees rarely buy your product, you need to find the reason, understand your conversion blockers, and fix them. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. That is why you have to track at least a few key metrics which will help you identify problems with the conversion rate fast.
- Traffic / Unique visitors – if you get very little traffic to your sign up page, you can’t count on a lot of signups even though your conversion rate is over 20%. Let’s do some quick math – you have 100 unique visitors on your page and your conversion rate is 20% which is not bad. Ultimately, you can get only 20 signups that is not that impressive! If you see that your marketing doesn’t drive enough unique visitors to the page, you should work on traffic acquisition strategy first, before improving conversion on other stages of your webinar funnel.
- Conversion rate – if you identify that people entering the sign up page leave it without landing on the thank-you page (ending up as a conversion), you should be worried. If you have set a milestone for 20% conversion rate as your minimum success criteria and your visitors convert at 7%, this raises a red flag. Perhaps, your page doesn’t load fast or some browsers can experience some usability issues with a sign up form. You need to drill into a custom report in Google Analytics to understand where the problem is.
- Turn up rate – if you find out that just a small fraction of your attendees who have signed up for the webinar turn up for a live recording, you should probably revise your pre-webinar nurturing activities and reminder emails.
- Attendee : Client conversion rate – Obviously, as your webinars are aimed at bringing in new business, you should also count the conversion rate of attendees to new clients.
9. Follow up after the webinar
Don’t forget about the power of follow-up emails. Consider sending a few post-webinar emails with the webinar recording and collect feedback after the webinar. Give the users who haven’t decided to buy your product yet, a reason to buy it. Provide some additional bonuses or a special offer and show a clear CTA that directs users to your sales page.
Convert more attendees and non-attendees into loyal customers within the first week after the webinar. Then nurture relations with those who haven’t bought anything no matter how hard you tried to provide them with the incentives. You can end up writing a proposal for them in a few months or a year – just don’t give up with the colder leads.
Source: Semrush
10. Repurpose content
After the webinar is over, you can reproduce the webinar content in some articles, short videos, or an ebook. Here are just a few ideas you can consider following after the webinar.
- Use webinar quotes – integrate them in your future articles and link back to the page with the webinar recording.
- Create a guide – turn your video content into text content without much effort. Create a transcript from the webinar and organize it into smaller chapters. Prepare a landing page where you will collect signups for your new guide.
- Cut video – use shorter video fragments as video content for your social media posts. You can also integrate video into paid ads.
- Prepare an evergreen webinar – some webinar tools offer evergreen webinars. That’s a good option if you want to generate leads on autopilot and are able to drive more traffic in a short period of time. However, if your tool doesn’t offer evergreen webinars, you can reorganize your thank-you page into a video replay page. This way, you can continue collecting signups for a webinar recording after the live transmission is over.
Are you ready for a killer webinar?
As you have learnt a few good strategies that have been tested in the trenches, it is time to plan for another webinar which will help you get even more sign ups, generate a higher turn up rate, and a better attendee to client conversion.
The next step is to plan your strategy carefully while accounting for these ideas. You might not integrate all of the ideas at once and improve all the key metrics as well. However, you can introduce them one by one as your webinar strategy evolves and you get more proficient at choosing the right topic, guests, and promote your webinars for better results. Good luck!
Author Bio
Margo Ovsiienko, Growth Marketing Strategist. She creates content that converts website visitors into paying customers for SaaS companies and tech agencies. She is writing on her hands on experience in marketing on her personal blog, Margo Leads.